DAFFODILS and primroses, wallflowers, forget-me-nots and many coloured aubretia had turned the lawns and walks of Athlington House that morning into a poem of dewy delight. The sky was so blue over the shoulder of Malvern Hills that young Brian Scott positively shouted his joy. Ned Deacon was late for a bout of tennis singles, and for once the forceful Scottie did not mind. Winter had gone, finally, undeniably. He tightened the net cord, looked carefully over Fred’s new marking of the court lines, bounced a nicely woolly ball several score of times upon his racket, and was about to pick a few flowers for the hall table when suddenly, through the garden’s music, an oddness in the traffic below struck him.
It was all going one way. Cars and lorries and vans came as usual from the direction of Hereford and South Wales, but nothing seemed to be coming from Worcester. He strolled to the edge of the bank and looked down. Mrs MacGregor was struggling on her ancient bicycle towards the Wells village shops, a dog was sleeping in the sunshine by the Hanley Swan turn, but there was no other living thing to dispute the whurr, whurr, whurr of traffic from the west. Odd! Was the road up somewhere?
‘Hi! Hi! Sorry I’m late, me lad!’ Ned Deacon at last turned puffing up the drive. ‘Had to do some chores for Muzz; you know what women are.’
‘What is the matter with the road, Ned?’
‘Road? Seems straight enough to me. What is the matter with your eyes?’
‘The traffic is all going one way.’
Ned Deacon was practising terrific forearm drives with his racket at an invisible ball. ‘Let it. A little thing like that doesn’t bother me.’
‘Well, come on, Hell Hound. My service is going to bother you a lot this morning. Toss for the shady side?’
‘Heads!’
‘Lost already, Ned. It’s Tails.’
They settled down to the game. It was indeed a morning beautiful beyond belief, and both produced startling form. ‘Van in—Van out’ rang endlessly through the air. They began to perspire, and it was only when they threw themselves down upon the grass for a breather that Scottie’s mind returned to the question of the one-way traffic.
‘Those cars are still at it, Ned,’ he remarked.
The other wrinkled his snub nose comically. ‘It would be odd if they weren’t, you know. Do you expect all the traffic in the land to vanish politely because you want to be poetic and listen to the birds?’
‘Don’t be a pork pie!’
‘There’s nothing porcine about that, Scottie. Maybe it is a Worcester Race Day: we usually get a stream of cars through Malvern then.’
Scottie agreed, lightly enough as he was to see it later.
‘Maybe. Are you fit for another set?’
Tennis was resumed. Morning shadows edged away from the lawn; birds still twittered and called; the sun grew hot. Towards noon, as they changed sides for the fifth set, Brian Scott noticed a twinkle of silver buttons on the road below.
‘Aha!’ he exclaimed. ‘Police now—as I live, diverting the traffic round Upton way!’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
Ned jumped the net and stood by Scottie’s side, frankly gaping.
‘Let’s go down and ask two or three thousand questions.’
But the police sergeant, as always, told little. He knew the Scott family well—Mr Scott had been a special constable during the war—nevertheless he was polite and evasive.
‘Don’t rightly know what the trouble is, as yet, sir,’ he said, waving a motor cyclist down the Hanley Road. (‘No road through to Worcester this way!’ he called to the cyclist. ‘You may go on if it’s for this side the Severn.’ The cyclist roared away downhill.) ‘Sorry I can’t help you, Mr Brian.’
‘Is there a landslide or something?’ Ned asked.
‘Oh no. The trouble seems to be at Worcester Bridge. We’ve had to close it.’
Ned whistled. ‘Close Worcester Bridge? That will mean a lovely pickle at St. John’s and in the city.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Temporary, I suppose? Road up?’
‘I don’t think it is the road. I believe there’s a dangerous stress in the bridge itself.’
Scottie boiled into excitement. ‘I say, Ned; let’s catch the bus and go and have a look!’
‘The bus service into Worcester is suspended, sir.’
‘The train, then. Or we could cycle it.’
The sergeant had his back to the young men and was talking into the cab of a lorry, so the two friends returned to the garden of Athlington House. Already there seemed to be a slight shadow in the sunshine.
The lunch gong sounded; tennis was over.
‘I think we ought to go down to St. John’s, you know, Ned,’ Scottie said, with the steely glint which came to his blue eyes in moments of crisis. ‘Bicycles out—in three quarters of an hour? Right after lunch?’
Ned slipped naturally into the rank of lieutenant. ‘On the pip, Scottie. No lunch at all, if you like.’
‘Better eat; then we’ll have the whole afternoon free. I wonder what’s happened to that bridge. Scamped workmanship somewhere? Stress of spring floods?’
Ned passed into gloom. ‘They’ll have it right by nightfall. They always do, worse luck! Nothing has a chance of going wrong in this safety-first country.’
‘Do you want it to go wrong, chump?’
‘Yes. Nothing ever goes decently wrong nowadays, to give a chap the chance of adventure. They’ve made the world safe for dodderers.’
‘Lunch,’ Scottie said pointedly, and the two parted.
Shortly after the clock struck again they were spinning gaily through Malvern Link for Worcester. The day still was lovely, huge piles of white cloud sailing across the blue behind Malvern Hills, the chequer board of fields below appearing set for a game among giants. Police, of course, stood at most junctions, Scottie having to name his destination several times, but the road-island at Powick was reached without further trouble. The traffic became a nuisance there. Many diverted cars had swung round the little lanes in defiance of authority, and a fretful pipping of horns, the grinding of gears, and ‘the usual idiot trying to reverse away’, as Ned pointed out, led to general excitement.
‘Have you been here long, sir?’ Ned asked rather naughtily of an irascible-looking man with a hairy moustache and jutting eyebrows and hairy ears and a hairy tweed coat.
‘Since the devil was a baby, my boy!’ the old fellow barked, grey eyes flashing with delight at the chance of an explosion. ‘Since the devil was a baby! Gooseberries could grow whiskers whilst these soppy police are making up their minds. Early on, some traffic was sent along to a bridge of sorts at Holt; then the blue-helmets whinnied with worry and had engineers out to see if that bridge was safe enough—for a brigade of tanks, I have no doubt.’
‘And they have closed that, too?’
‘Closed it, my boy?’ the old gentleman roared, so heartily that a few grey hairs growing adventurously on the end of his nose reared up and joined in the protest. ‘They would close their grandmothers’ false teeth if they saw a speck on one of ’em! We are here until midsummer. Might as well send home for bathing trunks.’
Ned and Scottie laughed and cycled along the winding line of cars. Around St. John’s itself a festive twinkle of windscreens and chromium plate in the sunshine betokened a hold-up even more monumental than they expected.
‘I say, what a lark!’ Ned cried appreciatively. ‘If they don’t throw that bridge open by dark there’s going to be a lot of clean fun sifting all these fellows away.’
‘Major Whiskers will explode outright,’ Scottie smiled, ‘or swim the river without sending for his bathing pants.’
‘Gentle old cove!’ was Ned’s comment. ‘Hadn’t we better park our bicycles in Harry’s place? Look at this tangle. We can’t get any farther now, except on foot.’
The bicycles were wheeled behind a rhododendron clump in a St. John’s garden, an airy wave of the hand to their friend’s mother being deemed sufficient explanation; and together the young men walked down towards the river. A sense of jubilee was in the air. The crowd which surged round the sullen motorists had all the cocky good humour of workers when toil is interrupted by something outside their masters’ control. Garage hands became talkative about bridge construction. Countrymen volunteered very detailed information about minor roads to the passive folk who were imprisoned in their cars and had little hope of ever reaching the roads described. Children whooped and skated along the pavements.
An enterprising merchant had turned out with a barrow of pears and apples and mineral drinks. An Italian ice-cream bin stood beside him, and Scottie remarked that such vendors would be awake for a last little dribble of trade even though St. Michael and all his angels had appeared on the roof of Worcester Cathedral.
‘Human beings are lovely,’ he exclaimed with a wisdom beyond his years. ‘Nothing really upsets them except the police.’
Below the simple and dignified stone bridge there was a great fussing of boats. Every waterman of the city was out, ferrying passengers—no doubt at exorbitant fares—from the pleasure piers to the bridge steps on the opposite bank. A boat full of engineers hovered beneath the arches, and Ned and Scottie noticed at once that the east bank arch was out of true.
‘Hitch a sky-bolt on to take the weight!’ a youth in dungarees called merrily, and other foolish suggestions were offered in the manner dear to English hearts.
The engineers affected not to hear, preserving a dignified consultation among themselves, but one of the group, leaning over to examine the stone in the arch, was caught by a lurch of the boat and in recovering balance lost his pipe into the river—to general mirth upon the banks.
‘Another shilling on the rates!’ someone moaned comically, but at that moment attention was diverted with dramatic suddenness to the metal railway bridge a little farther upstream.
TRAINS had been puffing to and fro over this ugly structure all day—the local service from Henwick into the city, of course, being particularly crowded—but in the excitement of the road hold-up few people had taken much notice of its heavy straight line against the limpid blue of the sky. It was an eyesore to which most Worcester folk had become inured. Everyone knew of the knacker’s yard on the left bank and the electricity works and evil-smelling slums on the right, with one great brick pier thrusting down into the river to support the track; and it was a general habit to look the other way, towards the cathedral and St. Andrew’s spire and the sweet curve of the fields. But now Scottie became aware of labourers pointing, and a yell, and very excited talk.
‘Ned! Ned!’ he exclaimed, grabbing his companion’s arm and likewise pointing. ‘Look at that rail track!’
A goods train had just gone over, and behind it the line of the understruts was sagging like rubber.
Scottie could not believe his own eyes. The whole span from centre pier to the left bank was drooping in a curve, probably three to six feet deep!
‘What is happening to our bridges?’ Ned gasped. ‘D’you think some enemy nation——’
‘The ’Ereford Express!’ a dungareed man shouted then. ‘Gawd! The express is a-coming! Listen!’
Unutterable horror swept through the crowd. Close at hand an engine siren wailed and there was the swift onward rush of wheels. Everyone heard a signal click up, everyone heard the tearing of brakes, but things had happened too quickly and an instant later engine and coaches shot into sight, slowing indeed, but passing half-way across the bridge before the nightmare sagging began at the right-hand span. Not an onlooker moved. It was as though all were turned to stone. The bridge beneath the moving train drooped, its metal underparts falling away, drooped like rope, and like rope it finally snapped.
The engine attained the Worcester bank, somehow dragging the lurching coaches after it. In a moment of inspiration its driver had evidently decided to crowd on all the speed he could, and hundreds of lives were saved by his courage. Three, four, five, six coaches were drawn to safety—the crowd was bawling at fever pitch now—and even the brake van was hauled to firm embankment before the first metal of the track plunged into the river.
By a miracle that train had got over, but the bridge still was going down, its component parts snapping and pinging and falling through air, the short line breaking into two curves which slowly and horribly sank to the water. It was incredible—like something in a dream. Scottie, in fact, felt as though he was awakening o. . .
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